Fred warned the American public and scientists in the 1950s about the dangers of artificial man-made trans fats. His research was largely ignored and criticized by the food industry and by scientists who were funded by the food industry for decades. Despite mounting evidence in both animals and humans that artificial trans fats dramatically increased the risk of heart attacks, strokes, peripheral vascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and probably several forms of cancer, the FDA ignored his pleas to address the issue. In 2009 Professor Kummerow filed a petition with the FDA to ban the use of trans fats. Although federal law required that the FDA respond within 180 days to such a petition, the FDA remained silent. In 2013, approaching the age of 99, Professor Kummerow sued the FDA. Two years latter in 2015 the FDA declared that artificial trans-fats were unsafe and should be eliminated from the US food supply by 2018.

Through his lifelong work, Professor Kummerow has produced a policy change that will likely save hundreds of thousands of lives.

What are trans fats and why have they been in our food for 7 decades?

Although there are some forms of natural trans fats which are safe for consumption when consumed in whole foods, artificial trans-fats are produced by placing unsaturated fat (such as corn oil, soy oil) under high pressure and high temperature conditions and adding hydrogen in the presence of a metal catalyst. These fats were introduced to many American foods because they dramatically extend the shelf life of foods and give a pleasant mouth texture to a variety of processed foods. They remain in many foods still on the shelves today. You cannot rely on labels such as “NO TRANS FATS” OR “TRANS FAT FREE” because food companies are allowed to make this statement as long as the amount of trans fats does not exceed 0.5 grams per serving. No amount is safe!

The Institute of Medicine, on July 10, 2002 declared manufactured trans fatty acid (TFA) a serious danger to the health of our nation with a: “tolerable upper intake level of zero.” This means there is no safe level of consumption. Despite that strong statement in 2002, it has taken the efforts of an elderly professor, including a lawsuit, to bring the FDA around to finally address the issue.

But it is not over yet, you can bet that the food industry will try to delay the implementation of the ban or possibly even argue against the overwhelming science that supports such a ban.

In the meantime read labels. If any food item contains “partially hydrogenated” oil of any kind or “hydrogenated oil” of any kind it contains trans fats. These foods are typically foods you should not be eating any way because they usually also contain added sugar, refined flour and/or refined easily oxidized inflammatory “vegetable” oils. They are not whole foods and therefore should not be consumed for many reasons. But if you want to eat cake, cookies, crackers, bread, or any other processed foods, beware and read the ingredients so as to at least avoid trans-fats.

You can read about Fred Kummerow, his life and research at these sites:

Fred also studied the effects of a oxysterols and oxidized low-density lipoprotein (OxLDL) both of which contribute to atherosclerosis. In a 2013 publication Professor Kummerow stated

“levels of oxysterols and OxLDL increase primarily as a result of three diet or lifestyle factors: the consumption of oxysterols from commercially fried foods such as fried chicken, fish and french fries; oxidation of cholesterol in vivo driven by the consumption of excess polyunsaturated fatty acids from vegetable oils; and cigarette smoking.”

Yet the American Heart Association continues to recommend increased consumption of polyunsaturated fats from the likes of corn oil, soy oil, cottonseed and similar oils. I have discussed the problems with that advice here and here.

So the next time you avoid trans fats by reading food labels, think of Professor Kummerow who brought light to some very dark areas in the history of nutrition and food in the US.

Today I watched a great TED talk by Dr. Rangan Chaterjee discussing his own journey in the discovery and implementation of a functional medicine approach to caring for his patients. The concept of using basic science and clinical science to diagnose and treat the root causes of illness, rather than treating symptoms, has been around for more than two decades. This approach has recently started to attract more attention, especially within the community of younger physicians who have become more dissatisfied with the frustrations of traditional allopathic medicine.

Here is the talk. Dr. Chatterjee covers lots of ground in a passionate and informative talk.

Enjoy this talk. If you would like to learn about how a functional medicine approach can CURE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE then watch this video of Dr. Bredesen who gave this lecture at a meeting of the American College of Nutrition.

Doctor Bredesen, an acclaimed neuroscientist, researcher, and more recently a brilliant clinician, has been criticized by the academic research community for implementing a clinical research protocol that addresses more than one variable at a time! Unfortunately, medical science has been handcuffed by the drug-model of clinical research wherein only one variable (drug vs. placebo for example) is studied. But if an illness has many potential contributing root causes, changing only one variable is doomed to failure, as Dr. Bredesen explains in this lecture.

Sleep well, eat clean, get outdoors every morning to help keep your circadian rhythm and biological clock in order.

I recently received this warning from one of my favorite food safety organizations.

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking comments on a dangerous proposal that will put our farms, our food, and our environment at risk.

The EPA is proposing a dramatic expansion of the use of the toxic pesticide Enlist Duo. Enlist Duo is a mixture of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup®) and the even more toxic 2,4-D (part of the chemical mixture Agent Orange). If approved the pesticide cocktail could be used on corn, soy, and cotton in 34 states — up from 15 states where the product was previously approved for just corn and soy.

The rush to expand the use of Dow AgroSciences’ toxic chemical concoction of glyphosate and 2,4-D for use on the next generation of genetically engineered crops comes only one year after the EPA asked a court to revoke its previous approval due to the unknown risks it posed, and now EPA suddenly wants to more than double the number of states where the pesticide can be used.”

Unfortunately we will likely see an acceleration of such proposals under the Trump administration. Trump has discussed terminating the EPA altogether. It is going to be a difficult four years for food safety.

By now most of you have already heard about the study published in JAMA that reveals an unsavory historical scenario wherein the sugar industry funded an academic review paper that diverted the medical community’s attention from sugar as a vector for disease and erroneously placed it on saturated fat and cholesterol consumption. You can read about it by clicking on the following link.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

Here is the abstract of the article published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).

Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD. Policymaking committees should consider giving less weight to food industry–funded studies and include mechanistic and animal studies as well as studies appraising the effect of added sugars on multiple CHD biomarkers and disease development.

This disturbing conspiracy reveals yet another industry sponsored distortion of science which had great impact on the health of our nation. The impact is accelerating today as the epidemics of obesity and diabetes rage out of control. But sugar consumption has not just been tied to obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes. Sugar added foods and beverages have likely contributed to dementia, many forms of cancer and other chronic debilitating diseases. Sugar and refined carbohydrates mediate these effects by increasing systemic inflammation and contributing to insulin resistance. Inflammation and insulin resistance are pathways to many disease processes. Metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetes) is the hallmark combination of multiple abnormalities with insulin resistance as the underlying root cause. Prolonged insulin resistance leads to type 2 diabetes and contributes to heart attacks, strokes, cancer and dementia. In fact dementia is often referred to as type 3 diabetes, mediated in large part by insulin resistance in the brain.

The discussion covers several important issues. To Pique your interest in reading further here are a few salient quotes.

Glyphosate is the most used herbicide in the world, the pride and joy (as well as a great cash cow) of mega-giant chemical manufacturer Monsanto. Although ubiquitous as Roundup® and generally presented for many decades as safe for humans and animals, in 2015 The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization labeled glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”[3]

The European Union (EU) is trying to determine whether Monsanto should have its license to sell Roundup renewed this year. With that renewal in mind, in the spring of 2016, 48 members of the EU Parliament, representing 13 nations, volunteered to have their urine tested for glyphosate. All were found positive by a German lab.[4] In May 2016, a University of California, San Francisco, lab working for The Detox Project, funded by concerned individuals, reported positive urine tests for glyphosate in 93% of 131 urine samples from across the United States.[5]

Is this widespread presence of glyphosate in humans incidental and harmless or are we all in danger of being poisoned by this Monsanto product? That is a very good question.

Remember the gut microbiome? We are learning a great deal about how it influences so much of human health. There is a project called Qmulus, at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and funded in part by Quanta Computers of Taiwan. Under its auspices, authors Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, in a 40-plus-page review[6] with 286 references, paint a very troubling picture of glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 enzymes. For example, one role of this enzyme is to detoxify xenobiotics. The authors propose that the consequences of this inhibition, when coupled with other synergistic disruptions, may insidiously induce many diseases associated with a Western diet, including diabetes, obesity, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s, and others.

A 2015 paper[7] by the same authors takes these and new findings and deductions even further to manganese deficiency in cows fed genetically modified Roundup Ready feed. This update is 55 pages long with 328 supporting references. Both are in open access; peruse them if you choose. [Editor’s note: Links to the full text of these papers are included with the references.]

If you want to learn more about Roundup, GMOs, and the worsening global threat to our food safety (no exaggeration) you can learn more by visiting www.CenterForFoodSafety.org.

I learned about this organization while watching the film The Future of Food. Although this hit the screens in 2004 it is still worth watching. If you think ROUNDUP is safe or that GMO foods are OK, think again. At least give this movie and website a look before you settle back into contentment with Monsanto and all the other bad actors in the food-seed-pesticide industry making decisions that WILL destroy the ability of farmers in the US and possibly world-wide to use their own seeds.

Monsanto has genetically engineered and patented a suicide gene and placed it into all of it’s seeds (cotton, soy, corn) so that farmers must buy seeds EVERY YEAR. This seed produces crops whose seeds are sterile. If this seed is carried by wind, animals, or other common mechanisms, from Monsanto’s’ crops to non-GMO fields, the gene will hybridize with natural seed crops and after several generations render a majority of crops infertile.

Monsanto produces not just pesticides but pesticide resistant seeds that produce sterile crops. Monsanto is playing monopoly and quickly eliminating independent seed producers and destroying family farms that have every year used their own seeds which have been bred to thrive in the local environment of the family farm.

Other issues abound. Roundup resistant crops, eaten by American consumers, have high levels of ROUNDUP and other pesticides that have been demonstrated to cause tumors in > 50% of animals within 1 year. Monsanto only tested ROUNDUP for 3 months in animal studies and declared it safe. The USDA did not test it. The FDA did not test it. Government scientists and university scientists who expressed concerns were silenced by the economic power of this massive multi-national corporation.

When independent scientists published their alarming results (carcinogenesis), Monsanto used it’s financial resources to shut those scientists down. You can learn about this by watching The Future of Food or visiting www.CenterForFoodSafety.org.

Like big Pharma executives cycling between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, Monsanto executives and lawyers cycle in and out of the FDA and USDA. We have allowed the fox to guard the chicken pen and the stakes are high. Family farms have been put out of business by Monsanto’s unethical and predatory behavior, eliminating generations of private seed banks and wreaking havoc for family farms across America. Don’t believe it? Watch the movie. Many farmers have gone bankrupt fighting legal battles with Monsanto because the wind has blown Monsanto’s patented seeds onto their private lands and Monsanto successfully sued them for patent infringement. This predatory behavior has been going on below the radar for many years and it started when the Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto can patent seeds.

In fact, Monsanto has gone into the US national seed banks, collected samples of thousands of different seeds, and patented them! This outrageous and ridiculous scenario has allowed a private company to patent thousands of heritage crop seeds.

If this sounds incredible, you are right, but it is true.

In the meantime, support mandatory GMO labeling and support food retailers who have promised to carry only NON-GMO foods.